The Cleveland Browns officially have a new quarterback as the Pittsburgh Steelers deal with the truth of what they are. Elsewhere, Barry McBride is so afraid of being annoying that he’s almost too shy to ask you to take advantage of a great subscription deal. Almost.
I’m easily mortified by my own behavior, so I like to sit inert while the world jumps frantically around me. I figure that if I don’t actually do or say anything, the chances of embarrassing myself shrink until, of course, some wiseacre questions why I’m displaying all the interaction skills of a table lamp without providing anything useful like visible light. Then, I have to make some noise until the attention shifts elsewhere. I’m a lot of fun at parties.
For the record, this behavior tends to change after several drinks, but that’s a subject for a different bloviation.
All this is a lead-up to explaining why the OBR does not spam our readers regularly. We have an email list with thousands of Browns fans on it, and we could slam it every day with pleas to subscribe or visit our site. But we don’t, partially because we’re business idiots and partially because I don’t want to be annoying. I should use it to send links to our stories out more frequently and plan to, but bugging people for money every day isn’t my thing.
Some of our competitors aren’t so shy. At various points in developing their subscription models, some have tried the “register on our site for ten free articles a month” model, which I dutifully did. My reward for that has been a constant barrage of daily subscription offers littering my mailbox. Our biggest competitor, who convinced me to give them an email address at some point, badgers me constantly. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d go through whatever rigamarole is required to unsubscribe from their daily come-ons.
Also less-than-shy is our business partner, 247Sports, part of CBS Sports. You may have received an email from them earlier today heralding a 75% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale starting today, which is accurate. We didn’t send those out here at the OBR, and we apologize if they annoy you. I will send out one email at some point and a bunch of social media posts, but we aren’t going to beat you senseless with marketing messages just because this is an important sale for us.
If you’ve been paying attention to the site (I can’t blame you if you haven’t, because there are far more important things in your life), you may have noticed an uptick in the amount of content we write and the number of writers. We recently hired Pete Smith, who has been writing about the Browns for ages. Pete is producing a lot of new content for us, and I’ve gotten very positive feedback. Our existing writers have committed to producing more articles as well. You may also have noticed that we aim to produce one story exclusively for VIP subscribers each day, which dives deeper into subjects you care about.
Unlike most competitors, we don’t slap a paywall in front of stuff that used to be free and stand there tapping our feet with our hands out. We’re trying to produce new stuff you can’t get elsewhere for our VIP offering. We offer interaction you don’t get elsewhere, deeper film reviews, cap analysis unavailable elsewhere, etc. Most of our original content remains free, our live shows and podcasts are free, and so are most of our forums.
Hiring Pete and cranking out more content than ever is the fulfillment of a promise that we’ve been making for years: if you support us, we will turn around and re-invest your subscription dollars into doing more and creating a better site for Browns fans. I’m very excited about what this site is becoming, and most of that is thanks to the support of subscribers.
The Week 11 All-22 has arrived and Jake is back to break down the tape from the Browns’ huge 13-10 win over the Steelers. The show starts with an opener joined by Andrew Spayde, where they discuss the Rodney McLeod injury, everything that mattered in the win, and what they learned about the team in a huge division win. Then Jake goes into the review and shares his information gathered from both sides of the ball. On offense, you get how often the Browns ran their personnel groupings (including key changes), schemes of note (including the quick throw game), analysis of the halftime tweaks, and how the players performed individually. On defense, you get the same analysis of who lined up where throughout the contest, blitz packages, coverage notes, and how the players performed shutting down another offense. You get some special teams notes as well.
